Houston, we have a problem

Namely, reading. Every week Nick brings home one sheet of homework that has his weekly sight words and letter sound that they have been working on. He does the homework and we kind of forget about it. Life is pretty busy and I figured he was doing OK in school so I kind of glossed over the sight word games and other things he was bringing home (Well that and he would pack them away in his piles so fast I barely had time to see them). We were busy and the thought of adding even more work to the load was a bit overwhelming.

Except now, we have to. Nick’s teacher emailed me this week about his reading abilities. Apparently, they are lacking. He’s not doing awful, but he’s not doing that great either. She’s asked us to spend some time each night reviewing his words. She sent home a set of flashcards on a ring and said we could tear them off as he learned them. The problem was he would miss different words every time we worked on them. Then he would get bored. And I can’t say I blame him. Flash cards are boring. So I scoured the Internet (mostly Pinterest) for a way to make sight words fun. The parking lot was the first non worksheet option I came across.

I made our first garage out of a piece of cardboard we had laying around. But, Mike and I both knew this option wouldn’t last. Nick is smart. After just a couple rounds of me calling out a word for him and him driving the car into its spot he numbered the parking spaces. I’m pretty sure if we would have kept this version for much longer he would have memorized the numbers that corresponded with the words instead of learning the words. That’s the way his brain works.

But, that wasn’t our only problem. The cardboard was also a bit warped so the car would go rolling around when they parked in certain spaces.

So I spent the rest of the weekend making a poster board version with laminated flashcards that sit in the spaces instead of having the words permanently in the spot. This way we can mix things up every time he uses the board. And while I don’t have any pictures Zander also got his own parking lot (he begged) that has cards with upper and lowercase letters. He can recognized just about every uppercase letter, but I am hoping having the lowercase letter on the same card will help him with that when the time comes.

As for the actual learning that was supposed to happen … it’s a work in progress. Nick is easily frustrated and easily distracted. I think he actually knows more than he shows, but he is just in such a hurry to get done that he says the first thing that comes to mind instead of actually looking at the word. I’m just thankful that he has such a wonderful teacher who communicated this problem with us before conferences so we could get started on a solution right away.